Within the depth-psychology and adjacent theological corpus, ‘Paul’ functions as one of the most contested and generative figures in the intellectual history of Western religious thought. The passages assembled here derive principally from Frank Thielman’s canonical-theological study of New Testament theology, supplemented by Joseph Campbell’s mythological reading of the Apostle’s missionary career. Thielman engages Paul primarily as a theologian whose coherence is disputed: some interpreters deny him systematic intention altogether, reading his letters as ad hoc rationalizations; others locate a unifying center — most persuasively identified as the grace of God — that organizes his diverse occasional correspondence. The tension between Paul as missionary pragmatist and Paul as principled theologian runs through virtually every passage. Key debates include the relationship of Mosaic law to the gospel, the inclusion of Gentiles within the covenant people, the coherence of his eschatology across multiple letters, and the ethical implications of justification by faith. Campbell, by contrast, frames Paul as a culture-hero whose Athens discourse illustrates the collision between Hellenistic philosophical culture and early Christian proclamation. Across these treatments, Paul emerges as a figure whose thought cannot be stabilized by any single hermeneutical key, yet whose insistence on divine grace as the exclusive ground of human redemption constitutes the irreducible theological constant of his witness.
If one theological theme is more basic than others in Paul’s letters, therefore, it is this notion that God is a gracious God and that he has shown his grace preeminently in his arrangement of history
Thielman argues that divine grace constitutes the unifying center of Paul’s entire theological project across all his letters.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005thesis
Locating a ‘center’ to Paul’s thought is one of the most common strategies among interpreters of Paul for making sense of his theology.
Thielman surveys the scholarly debate over whether Paul’s thought possesses a coherent theological center or remains irreducibly occasional and fragmented.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005thesis
Schreiner believes that Paul was fundamentally a missionary who understood both his mission itself and the suffering it required in theological terms.
Thielman presents Schreiner’s influential view that Paul’s identity as a missionary rather than a systematic theologian best explains the character and consistency of his letters.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005thesis
Paul inherited from Judaism the conviction that Gentiles must become Jewish proselytes in order to be saved from God’s wrath on the final day, but after his conversion the definition of a proselyte changed for him.
Thielman presents Donaldson’s argument that Paul’s conversion produced an unresolved tension between his inherited Jewish convictions and his new Christocentric redefinition of covenant membership.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005thesis
Paul then follows this statement with a ‘faithful saying’ that epitomizes this element of his theology: ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst’
Thielman demonstrates that Paul’s self-identification as chief of sinners, found across the Pastoral Epistles, encapsulates his theology of grace as the sole ground of salvation.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
a right standing with God comes from faith in Christ, and to claim otherwise is to ‘set aside the grace of God’ made available in Christ (Gal. 2:21).
Thielman shows that for Paul, any accommodation of the Mosaic law as a requirement for justification constitutes a fundamental negation of divine grace.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
To set God’s grace aside, he says, is to imply that Christ died for nothing (Gal. 3:21).
Thielman identifies grace as the concept Paul himself explicitly marks as central, making its displacement logically equivalent to rendering the crucifixion meaningless.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
Paul recognized that giving the Mosaic law even the smallest place within a local church was dangerous. Eventually its influence would expand until it had taken over.
Thielman traces how specific pastoral conflicts, particularly the Antioch confrontation with Peter, sharpened Paul’s theological perception of the law’s fundamental incompatibility with the gospel of Christ.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
Paul insists that the Spirit’s presence in Galatia shows that God’s promises through the prophets are being fulfilled and that human beings are too sinful to contribute anything to their redemption.
Thielman presents Paul’s pneumatological argument in Galatians as the linchpin of his case against human moral self-sufficiency and for God’s exclusive initiative in salvation.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
the occasional scholarly claims that Paul’s thinking on the nature of existence after death underwent a shift from a materialistic to a spiritual conception… have little plausibility in light of this evidence.
Thielman defends the consistency of Paul’s eschatological anthropology against developmental theories that posit a shift from Jewish to Hellenistic frameworks.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
‘False apostles’ had perhaps caused, and at least encouraged, the rift between himself and the Corinthians (11:13). These opponents of Paul valued an impressive bodily presence, sophisticated rhetorical technique.
Thielman reads 2 Corinthians as Paul’s sustained contrast between apostolic existence grounded in suffering and weakness versus his opponents’ valorization of rhetorical display and social prestige.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
Paul does not, therefore, appeal to Philemon, as Pliny seems to do, on the basis of an affection that has naturally developed between a master and his household slave, but on the basis of Jesus’ own reduction of the Mosaic law’s regulation of social relationships to the precept of Leviticus 19:18.
Thielman argues that Paul’s appeal to Philemon regarding Onesimus is grounded not in sentimental patronage but in the theological demand of the love command as radicalized by Jesus.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
Paul believes that the destruction of the church’s unity is a direct violation of the church’s sanctity. To divide the church over special teachers (3:3–4) and social classifications (11:19) is to destroy the temple of God.
Thielman shows that in 1 Corinthians, Paul’s concern for ecclesiastical unity is theologically rather than merely socially driven, grounded in the church’s identity as God’s holy temple.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
the gracious nature of the gospel is also revealed in Paul—in the gospel he preached, in the way he preached it, and in the timing of his work among the Corinthians.
Thielman demonstrates that Paul’s own apostolic practice — the content, method, and timing of his proclamation — is itself presented as an embodiment of the gospel’s gracious character.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
Jesus himself suffered in a way that brought ‘comfort’ to others, and, in a similar way, Paul, through his suffering in the service of the gospel, extends ‘comfort and salvation’ to others.
Thielman reads 2 Corinthians 1 as Paul’s articulation of a theology of participatory suffering in which the apostle’s afflictions replicate and extend Christ’s own redemptive pattern.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
Paul provides the Philippians with resources for coping with their anxiety both about Paul’s fate and about their own fate as believers in a society hostile to their commitment.
Thielman presents Philippians as a practical theological document in which Paul offers both argument and personal example as pastoral resources for communities facing persecution and anxiety.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
Paul was subsequently arrested and sent to Judea’s administrative capital, Caesarea, where the corrupt governor Felix left him in prison for two years, hoping for a bribe.
Thielman traces the biographical circumstances of Paul’s imprisonment as the historical context for the composition of Colossians and related captivity letters.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
A few joined Paul and believed. But his harvest was disappointing. So he shook the dust of Athens from his feet and went to the trading city of Corinth.
Campbell frames Paul’s Athenian mission as a mythologically significant cultural encounter whose failure drives the apostle toward the more fertile ground of Greco-Roman mercantile society.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
Paul, in Romans 4:1–4, makes the point that the works the Mosaic law prescribes, such as circumcision, do not place one within the people of God and therefore justify one in God’s sight.
Thielman invokes Paul’s argument in Romans 4 as the foil against which the apparent contradiction between Pauline and Jamesian theologies of faith and works must be adjudicated.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005aside
He wrote to them ‘out of great distress and anguish of heart and with many tears,’ not to grieve them, he says, but to let them know the depth of his love for them.
Thielman documents the emotional and rhetorical register of Paul’s ‘tearful letter’ to Corinth as evidence of the relational dimension underlying his theological controversies with that community.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005aside